


What To Do On A Day Off

by JackOfNone



Category: Oglaf
Genre: Comedy, Crack, Multi, Slice of Life
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2010-12-20
Updated: 2010-12-20
Packaged: 2017-10-13 21:35:21
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,848
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/141961
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/JackOfNone/pseuds/JackOfNone
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Two guards and a mid-tier bureaucrat find their day off interrupted by an unusual problem. All in a day's work for the employees of the Mistress.</p>
            </blockquote>





	What To Do On A Day Off

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Cephalopod](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Cephalopod/gifts).



> This is easily the strangest thing I've ever written, and it's a slice-of-life fic. Go figure.

It is said that in order to become one of the Mistress’s guards, you must first fight a full-grown tiger while stark naked and live to tell the tale.

This is not precisely true. The Mistress, generally speaking, selected her guards for their looks and let the natural course of events sort the wheat from the chaff. Those unsuited to the job would inevitably fall to an assassin’s blade, or fail to return from a scouting mission, or (on at least one occasion that the cleaning crew would remember for decades) try to seduce the Laser-Dicked Incubus of Gar that the Mistress kept in the basement for special occasions. Incompetent guards were a problem that, eventually, solved themselves, leaving an elite and loyal fighting force fully worthy of their fearsome reputation.

The naked tiger-fighting rumor was probably the result of a diplomat visiting on the Winter Solstice, which was traditionally celebrated in this manner (for certain values of ‘traditionally’).

It was on just such a Winter Solstice that Captain Zayn of the Fifteenth Regiment of Pain found herself sitting at the top of the bleachers at the arena, trying to enjoy her day off. The unexpected lack of her second-in-command, Lieutenant Mim, was seriously throwing a wrench into her plans — the bloodsports, drinking, and brawling she could manage alone, but the adreneline-fueled sex afterwards was definitely going to be less exciting by herself. Besides, Zayn actually _liked_ Mim, and the fact that she hadn’t put in an appearance at the Winter Solstice Annual Naked Tiger Fighting Extravaganza was a bit worrisome — Zayn knew that Mim liked pointless violence better than almost anything else in the world. Mim had started out as part of the Mistress’s harem, but had quickly received a battlefield promotion after a group of werewolves somehow got loose in the bathhouse and Mim had taken the enterprising step of beating them at their own game by biting one to death. She wasn’t the type to miss an arena fight.

Zayn’s pointed ears twitched. Someone was coming up behind her, and that set a whole host of reflexes in motion.

Her sword was out and at the man’s throat before the rest of the spectators could blink.

“Er,” said a smallish, bearded individual, blinking behind his spectacles. “I would appreciate it if you would refrain from running me through.”

“Dalat,” Zayn sighed. “You’ve got to stop creeping up on me.”

“Your definition of ‘creeping up’ is ridiculously broad,” he huffed, and adjusted his glasses.

Dalat was the Head Orgy Planner, and had been for quite a while — the longest anyone had ever lasted as Head Orgy Planner before temptation inevitably overcame their desire for efficiency and the Mistress was forced to have them beheaded and replaced. Dalat owed his longevity to one simple reason: he seemed to genuinely prefer logistics to sex. His ability to turn the most debauched party plans into a dry exercise in dildo-to-orifice ratios made him one of the most useful people in the castle, albeit one of the worst conversationalists.

“What’s wrong? I thought you had work to do.”

“Well, Lieutenant Mim sent me to fetch you, Captain. She said she would have come herself, but she didn’t want to leave the, er…scene of the problem.”

Captain Zayn furrowed her brow. “Something the matter with the lieutenant?”

“I’m not sure, Captain. She just said she needed someone who was smart, and that you were smart. It’s something to do with a chaise lounge, though.”

Captain Zayn sheathed her sword with one sinuous movement. “All right. Fine. Lead on.”

Dalat bowed, and there was a shriek from the arena that might have been victory, or might have been dismemberment. Either way, the crowd went wild.

* * *

They found Mim kneeling in the hallway, her brow furrowed in concentration, staring at what indeed appeared to be an unusually lumpy-looking chaise lounge. She was back in her old clothes for her day off, and the transparent silk made her look every inch the harem girl again — wide eyes, dark ringlets, and ample curves. Only the enormous halberd leaning against the wall — still notched from where it had connected too harshly with an enterprising assassin’s helmet — showed how well she had taken to her new job.

Mim broke into a wide grin when she noticed Captain Zayn approaching, and entirely forgot to salute. “Captain!” she said, then frowned again, apparently remembering that there was a problem. “I need a midwife. Do you know where to get a midwife? You’re always so good at requisitioning cannons and thumbscrews and things for the regiment.”

Zayn blinked. “A midwife? You don’t exactly look—“

“No, no, it’s not for me,” Mim explained. She pointed to the lumpy lounge. “It’s for that.”

Zayn blinked again. “Somebody knocked up the chaise lounge? How do you even _do_ that?”

Mim moved a throw pillow to reveal a place on the cushion where the fabric curved into the most realistic representation of a vagina that Zayn had ever seen, short of the real thing. It was even starting to drip a little, and seemed to be quivering with anticipation.

“What the fuck?” Zayn managed. Behind her, she heard Dalat groan.

“Oh, drat. Bother. Someone’s gotten ahold of one of our cunt augers.” It was the strongest profanity Zayn had ever heard the Head Orgy Planner use, and it sounded quite bizarre rolling off his tongue so easily — it must be the object’s proper name or something.

Mim shook her head. “Is…is that some kind of fortune-teller?” she asked.

“No, no. Not an augur, and auger.” Mim cocked her head, clearly not hearing the difference, but said nothing. “Mistress received an entire crate of them from the dwarves as tribute a few months ago. They, er…drill vaginas. In things. Mistress decided she didn’t want them — something about preferring them attached — but the Orgy Bureau has been finding them useful for those with…er, unusual tastes.”

“People really like the parable of the monk who fell in love with a mountain, huh?” Zayn said, with a lopsided smirk.

“I thought the point of that story,” Mim said, “was that the purity of the monk’s love wasn’t tainted by lust. Since, you know, he couldn’t sleep with the mountain and all.”

“That’s not exactly how we tell story in Xoan,” Zayn said, her grin widening. “Is it supposed to be so…functionally reproductive?”

“Er…not that I’m aware of. It may be a feature of the deluxe model. We don’t generally employ that one, since the dwarves’ idea of what constitutes ‘deluxe’ is somewhat suspect.”

“What are we going to do?” Lieutenant Mim said, clutching her hands together. “I was supposed to be guarding this wing of the castle last week. Mistress won’t be pleased that someone damaged her furniture!”

“Dalat, is there a way to, er…de-vaginify an inanimate object?” Zayn asked. Dalat pushed his glasses up on his nose.

“Usually taking the same auger and cranking it in the opposite direction works.”

“Good. Dalat, you go find out who’s got the missing cunt auger. Lieutenant, come with me. We’re going to find a midwife to take care of the, uh, baby.”

Mim, for her part, remembered to salute this time.

* * *

Dalat spent the next half hour busily cross-checking his records against his remaining inventory — something that he usually regarded as rather relaxing, like a warm bath. The sudden disappearance of even a perpetually unused piece of equipment, however, was sucking all the joy out his bureaucratic work.

No, the records checked out. There hadn’t been a mistake. They had received three of the deluxe model augers, and there were three special containers for them built of magically unbreakable glass, to prevent anyone dropping the things and accidentally giving the floor a new set of genitalia. The only people who really wanted to inflict that kind of thing on the already overworked janitorial staff were the torturers downstairs, and while everyone acknowledged that the torturers were quite necessary to the proper functioning of the Mistress’s citadel, nobody wanted to sit with them during staff lunches.

Three recorded ‘deluxe model’ augers. Three glass jars, one empty. Not a single record of anyone having officially requisitioned one of the augers for any purpose. All of this added up to only two conclusions: either someone in his staff had made a grave clerical error — the mere thought made him shudder with a deep-seated revulsion — or the Bureau had been robbed. This might not be worse than the time a junior chemist accidentally tipped a vial of Demon Pox into a vat of lubricant, but it was looking as though it might come close.

And it was his day off, too. He had been so looking forward to spending this day really getting down to some serious cataloging.

Dalat pushed his glasses up on his nose, sighed heavily, and closed his record book with a thud.

* * *

“Why is the infirmary downstairs next to the dungeons, anyway?” Mim asked, the clack of her halberd echoing off the cold, clammy stones. The tunnel smelled of fungus and damp, and the closer they got to the infirmary, the more Zayn’s sensitive Xoan nose could detect notes of blood and dead fish. Mim had taken command of the chaise lounge, now loaded onto a wheeled cart that the cooks used for hauling food.

“It’s downstairs next to the dungeons because that’s where it was when the castle was built,” Zayn replied. The dead fish smell was starting to overwhelm the rest of the scents; even Mim was starting to wrinkle her nose. “As far as I know, they were just excavating the place for the dungeons and just found the place, fully equipped and crawling with doctors. They think the infirmary was here before the castle was — probably long before.”

Mim, being new to the guard and surprisingly handy with a shield, had never really had the cause to go to the infirmary before. Zayn let her go in first.

The door creaked open, heavy and and ominous. It was dark inside, lit only by a few struggling candles and what appeared to be a fireplace, far in the opposite side of the room. The comparative brightness of Mim’s lantern in the gloom set off a cascade of skittering noises, as though someone had upturned an entire barrel of beetles, accompanied by a spine-tingling hiss. Mim shifted her feet into a battle stance, her eyes darting to and fro as if expecting an ambush, but Zayn laid a reassuring hand on her shoulder, grinning.

“Hood the lantern,” Zayn said. Mim shot her a glance and obeyed.

“What now?” hissed a voice from the shadows, near to Mim’s feet. “What do you rrrequire?”

“Um,” Mim said, tightening her grip on her halberd. “Are you _sure_ we shouldn’t be killing it?” Mim hissed to Zayn. “Because…it seems like something I should be killing.”

Zayn shook her head. “Doctor,” she said, with a polite bow.

The creature at Mim’s feet folded herself upwards. She — at least the creature looked kind of woman-shaped — was blindfolded, but moved with supernatural grace and generally gave the impression that what was under the blindfold hadn’t ever been eyes. Zayn elbowed Mim in the ribs.

“Tell the doctor what we’re here for,” she whispered in her ear. Mim swallowed.

“Do…do you good folk have a midwife for us?” she said. The doctor made a noise that was halfway between a snort and a sigh, revealing a toothless, glistening mouth like a lizard’s.

“Isss it permitted for usss to have the inffant?” asked the doctor. Mim looked around helplessly.

“You might not want it. It’s a chaise lounge,” Zayn interjected, while Mim was still stunned by the request. The doctor bobbed her head in an odd, lopsided version of a nod.

“Bring it in,” the doctor said. She turned, placed her hands against the wall, and ran directly up it, vanishing into the darkness.

“Well, come on,” Zayn said, clapping Mim on the back again, who jumped. Zayn tugged on the trolley and pulled the chaise lounge into the infirmary, pulling the covering off of it as she did so. The covering landed on the floor, in a pool of something that Zayn didn’t want to investigate too closely.

Three more doctors materialized from the shadows. Whether or not any of them were the same doctor they had just spoken to, Zayn had no idea. The were all dressed identically, if indeed they were dressed — Zayn had brushed up against a doctor once, and their ceremonial robes had felt disconcertingly like flaps of skin.

The lead doctor ran her hands over the velvet cushions and made a soft ribbiting sound. “Ffetch a bowl of water, sssome tongs, and ffive of the grubss,” she said.

“Zayn,” Mim asked, leaning close to her ear and whispering, “Why haven’t we hired real doctors?”

“They’re a damn sight more effective, sweetmeat. Besides, they eat the hopeless cases. Saves a lot of space.”

Mim couldn’t find fault with that line of logic.

* * *

Dalat knocked on the door quietly, then a little louder when that did not receive a response. Eventually, after some additional knocking that was far louder than Dalat liked to get, there was a noise of annoyance from behind the door, a rustle of expensive silk, the clink of crystal goblets, and the door swung open.

“Oh. It’s you,” the Xoan ambassador said, sounding immensely unimpressed. He appeared dressed for court, but he always appeared to be dressed for court. “Good job on last night, by the way, though I’d suggest leaving the cheese dip off the menu next time. For some of the guests, the temptation to misuse it became too great.”

Dalat, who knew precisely how impossible it was to plan a menu which would _not_ be misused at one of the Mistress’s functions, huffed in annoyance, but didn’t say anything. The amount by which the ambassador outranked him was vast, and regardless of how useful Dalat was, he could find himself upside down in a snake pit if the Xoan ambassador so much as mentioned it would be exciting.

“Many apologies, my lord—“ he began. The ambassador waved his hand.

“Just three or four will do, Dalat, I don’t have all night. Go on.”

“…Forgive me for the interruption, My Most Exalted Lord, but I’m looking for the Mistress’s apprentice. He was last seen around here, but he hasn’t been sighted for the rest of the day. I need to speak to him about his…um, well, there’s this chaise lounge —”

“Yes.” The Xoan ambassador leaned against the door frame and closed his pale eyes. “I ran across him in a state of distress. His sincere helplessness touched me deep in my heart. My compassion is boundless, like the ocean. If the ocean were actually boundless and full of compassion, rather than sea monsters.”

“Is he here, My Most Magnificent Liege?”

“Oh, yes. He’s afraid of being punished for something — I did not want to pry — so I am teaching him to be a citizen of Xoan. He will then be under my special protection and untouchable on pain of death. And pain. Of course, he first has to learn the customs of Xoan. We’re starting with traditional dress.”

“Um…” called a masculine voice from somewhere deep inside the cavern of silks and cushions that formed the private quarters of the Xoan ambassador. “How am I supposed to put on the tail? It doesn’t have a strap or anything…”

“You’re a clever boy,” the Xoan ambassador called back. “I’m sure you can come up with some method.” The ambassador smiled indulgently, and Dalat decided that discretion was the better part of diplomacy.

“I’ll come back later,” he said, bowing almost to the floor. The Xoan ambassador shrugged and closed the door in his face.

* * *

The birth had been an unpleasant affair. Zayn was still picking down out of her hair when she finally led Mim back to the barracks, carrying a miniature version of the original lounge. Zayn privately wondered what the little piece of furniture had inherited from its father, and whether or not it would grow up to anything substantial. The barracks could use some new furniture.

Mim sighed heavily, leaning on the table. “Hell of a way to spend our day off,” she said. Zayn reached over and ran her hand through her curls.

“Well, I’ve got a bottle of wine under my bed, and there’s an assassin in the dungeon that we’re allowed to use for target practice if you like,” Mim broke into her charming, innocent smile.

“You think just like me,” Mim said. Zayn wound her arm around Mim’s waist.

“Well, we’re like sisters at this point.” Mim raised an eyebrow. “Sisters who have sex. We have those in Xoan, you know.”

“Tell me more about your homeland,” Mim asked. She leaned into Zayn’s arms, and made a satisfying squeak as Zayn’s hand wandered southward.

“On the way,” she said, steering Mim towards the door. “Those assassins aren’t going to massacre themselves.”


End file.
